Electronista reports, “Microsoft has released a new ‘Scroogled’ ad, enlisting the Pawn Stars reality TV crew to deride a Chromebook as a worthless ‘brick.'”

“The online video begins with a woman entering a pawn shop to sell her Chromebook for cash to buy a ‘ticket to Hollywood,'” Electronista reports, “however shop co-owner Rick Harrison explains how the device is ‘not a real laptop’ because it ‘doesn’t do much at all’ when disconnected from a Wi-Fi network.”

“The Pawn Stars ad goes a step further than mere criticism of basic capabilities, focusing also on the privacy theme of Microsoft’s earlier videos,” Electronista reports. “‘When you are online, Google tracks what you do so they can sell ads; that’s how you get Scroogled,’ says Harrison. ‘Google is always trying to find ways to make more money off your personal information. This Chromebook hardware makes it even easier for them.'”

Desperate is right. Google’s Chromebook should not be a target for M$. It should be under the radar for them. Do they think/believe they’ve already lost to Apple and there is no hope there. Not worth the effort? Too funny.

It is actually a pretty shrewd move. They can truthfully bash a Google product as a lead-in to bash the entire Google business model. They also coined a perfect term for the holidays that people will remember and chose a spokesperson that will appeal to many as being fairly knowledgeable about the value of a wide variety of products.

Is M$ trying to put on the white hat and become the enemy of Apple’s enemy?
I think their real issue here is that a Chromebook doesn’t run real applications and there for doesn’t require Office. This is a double loss to M$.

Incredibly, “advertisements” no longer advertise your own crappy product. Tip for Microsoft – why not make a decent OS and tell the world about it! Oh that’s right, you’ve not been able to do that for the past 30 years so no point trying now!

It makes little sense to universally deride Microsoft. For many years now, it’s the only competition Apple has had, and despite horrid UI choices, the underpinnings of Windows have indeed been improved in substantial ways.

Going all the way back to the 80’s, you can’t say that the NT kernel didn’t have some really good things going for it. Sure, unscrupulous business practices put MS in the near-monopoly OS position that it still enjoys, but objective technological comparison shows that Windows really was better than the 3rd place and lower OSes that hung around until the late 1990’s. In some ways, Windows are better than Macs. XP and Win7 actually offered relatively stable, affordable, everyman computing with the customization and enterprise versatility that Macs have simply not offered consistently. The Mac may be our favorite GUI, but even the latest and greatest OS X has had its issues. It wasn’t until 10.2 when it got truly good. 10.6 remains arguably the most stable and efficient with least non-value-added GUI fluff. And to this day, Mac trails Windows in some areas: Apple ended up following Windows for file protocol (SMB), email handling, etc. HFS+ is getting dangerously dated. …and Apple doesn’t even offer many of the handy enterprise-ready tools with acronyms that the average fanboy can’t even decipher without the use of an online search engine that can’t be named.

Infoworld also points out the glaring issue that Mac fans often fail to acknowledge:

“OS X Mavericks has a few UI flaws that undercut its superb ease-of-use. Apple has been monkeying with its application file services since OS X Lion, so there are now three distinct UIs and services for saving files: one for traditional apps, one for Versions-enabled apps, and one for iCloud Documents-compatible apps. It’s confusing. OS X Mavericks doesn’t do anything to rationalize these differences. Also, though Apple encourages broad usage of the iCloud service, it doesn’t work with Apple’s Mail program. Adding or saving attachments becomes a rigmarole as you transfer the files from iCloud to your Mac’s local drive or vice versa. (iCloud is available only in apps obtained from the Mac App Store, so most Mac apps can’t use it.) ”

Lest the immature readers on these forums be tempted to knee-jerk react with rude accusations of trolling, Infoworld’s OS X 10.9 vs Win8.1 goes on to give the Mac OS the better final score, for many reasons we all know. But that doesn’t make the Mac perfect, nor the second best personal computer OS be derided unfairly. Both are great technical accomplishments that need significant future refinement.